


One Day She Will Swim with Dolphins

by scioscribe



Category: Community
Genre: Divorce, Female Friendship, Gen, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 23:19:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But she would be damned if she would let Andre take her legs out from underneath her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Day She Will Swim with Dolphins

**Author's Note:**

> I still can't tell if Andre left Shirley for a bank teller, a stripper, or a stripper who also worked part-time as a bank teller: here, I've gone with "stripper."

The first time Andre left, Shirley took Jordan and Elijah to stay with her mother. She made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the drive and packed them in their bright school lunch-bags with prewashed baby carrots and store-bought cookies. Afterwards, it would be the Chips Ahoy that would hurt her almost as much as Andre did. She fell apart very carefully, but she did fall apart, because Shirley Bennett did not send her children to her mother’s house without home-baked goods.

The good Lord would want Shirley to forgive her mother for not noticing those stiff little cardboard cookies just as Shirley forgave her for believing the lie she told—that Andre had gone out of town to visit a sick uncle and that Shirley was following him there, oh yes, he was very close to his Uncle Tim—but for some reason, Shirley found it easier to get over the way her mother never saw the way her smile froze in its place than she does the way her mother never blinked when the kids emptied the last of their cookie crumbs out onto the carpet, and crunched the last halves into their mouths.

Andre had said, “You make people feel like they have to live up to you. Like you’re so—so _perfect_. She never makes me feel like that. She never looks at me like I could be better.”

Shirley had said, “Did she look at you like that while she was running her tongue down a stripper pole? Because that might have been why you didn’t feel you had any lofty standards to live up to.”

“There,” he’d said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Shirley. Right there.”

After Shirley dropped her boys off at her mother’s, she drove as far away from anything as she could, until the miles between her and her house seemed like ones she could never get back. Then she pulled the car off the side of the road, hit the steering wheel so hard she bruised her hands, and screamed holy hell.

She had to call AAA because she didn’t have enough fuel left to get home.

It took her the rest of the night, with her throbbing hands, to box up what was left of Andre’s things. She fell asleep on the sofa with her face pressed against an afghan that she didn’t remember, until she woke up, had been a wedding present from his great-aunt.

*

But she would be damned if she would let Andre take her legs out from underneath her. They may not have been stripper’s legs and they may not have been twenty-two, toned from hip to ankle from playing the temptress all night long, but they were hers. There had been a time when Andre had licked sweat off the insides of her thighs and smiled up at her, but even if that time was not now, Shirley could still fucking walk, so she walked herself to Greendale and signed up for classes.

A little straw wrapper of a man said he was the Dean and could fill her paperwork out for her. He had to do it by hand with a golf pencil.

“Now,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Marketing,” Shirley said. “And Spanish,” because she wanted to be bilingual on the website that seemed to have spent a few years now in some shoebox in her brain, waiting for Andre to knock the lid off so the light could get in to whatever dreams she’d been having without knowing it. It was like God closing a door and opening a window, only the door had been her marriage and the window was a community college where the Dean put a smiley face sticker on her class schedule. The sticker congratulated her on having a great smile.

“We got a few sheets of these bad boys from a dentist who takes some night classes,” he said, when he saw her looking at the wide, toothy grin on that little yellow circle. “I know, I know—not ethical to take gifts from students! But who’s going to tell?” He winked at her, like they were in on it together.

Then he said, “Anyhow,” and checked her registration slip, “ _Shirley Bennett_ , lovely name, you _do_ have a great smile.”

Shirley remembered that he was right, she did, and that mattered the way her legs mattered—they were things about her that had always been true, and still were. That was nice.

*

Starting to love people again was the same kind of thing—something she had always been good at and suddenly had the excuse to think of again. She had never stopped loving her boys and there was a part of her that gnawed like a rat in her stomach that hadn’t stopped loving Andre, but the study group reminded her that she could throw her heart away if she wanted to, and still be fine.

There was a messiness to them that she loved because it seemed more honest than the way Andre had kept buying her scarves and pretty earrings right until he told her he was leaving. Her boys and her girls, though, they couldn’t do that to her, not because they were better but just because there was only so much dirty laundry a person could stuff into one hamper, and all of them were overflowing out the sides with socks that hadn’t been washed since last Christmas. They let Shirley be messy, too: loud and unfriendly sometimes, even to her friends, and sticking garden hoses in desk drawers with her pretty smile all stiff on her face like it was going to slide off.

So she didn’t mind it when Britta showed up with a cat in her arms, both cat and skinny blonde girl half-drenched from the rain because Britta would never think of buying an umbrella.

“Cat-sit?” Britta said hopefully, holding out the bedraggled thing like Shirley was supposed to think it was cute. It wasn’t, not one-eyed like it was, and soaked down tiny as a rat.

Shirley let her in and started making the green tea she kept around for Britta. “Are you going out of town? We have a quiz on Monday, remember?”

“How could I forget? I always remember information screamed at me with the corollary that my face will be eaten if I don’t show up on time. No, it’s just that the other one’s sick and it keeps crying and this little guy keeps climbing up my leg while I’m trying to get cat medicine into milk and then into a baby bottle, and I—” Britta sniffled. “I just needed a little bit of a break, so I locked him in the laundry room with some warm towels and came here?”

“Oh, Britta,” Shirley said. “Of course I’ll watch your cat for you.”

Britta shoved her face against the steam coming up from the teacup. “Thanks, Shirley, you’re a lifesaver, really.”

Shirley wrapped the cat in a dishtowel and let him swat at the loose threads. She rubbed her hand over his belly. He wasn’t as ugly as she’d thought he’d been at first, now that he was drying off a little. “Why do you get the ones with one eye? You’re the only person I know that buys kittens just so they won’t be cute.”

“We’re all one-eyed cats,” Britta said. “About to be put to sleep if we don’t pass some test on what’s cute, don’t look right, don’t act like all we want is a ball of yarn and some milk.”

Shirley stroked the cat under his chin. She said, “My ex-husband, when he left, he said that I was too hard on him, that I looked at him like I thought he could be better. Not be a one-eyed cat, I guess. Do I do that, do you think?”

Britta reached across the table and took Shirley’s other hand, the one that wasn’t petting the cat. “Let me answer that question with another question—what’s wrong with thinking that people could be a little bit better? How else is anything going to change?” And soon they were talking about standing out in the night with tape over their mouths while Pierce lit himself on fire, and Shirley remembered baking brownies for protests about Guatemala, how good it had felt to be angry in the way she had been when she’d first walked into Greendale, the kind of anger that got things done.

*

When Andre came back, Britta said, “Oh, I’m so happy for you,” at the same time she said, “You know this is only because of patriarchal religious mores, right?”

Shirley held her purse strap in her hands and dug her fingernails into the leather. “I’m ninety-percent sure you meant ‘congratulations.’”

“Totally,” Britta said. She smiled like a picture of somebody else smiling: Britta had a pretty smile, but that wasn’t it. Shirley felt the give underneath her nails, the pressure biting back into her fingers, and she smiled back a smile that wasn’t her own, either. Andre was the father of her children—hopefully the father of _all_ her children—and this was what she was supposed to do. Because outside of Greendale and her codependent, neurotic study group, the world still worked the way it had always worked, and Britta’s kind of anger—even Shirley’s old kind of anger—didn’t mean anything, not really.

“Britta’s the worst,” they all said, not just when she tried to drink out of the soda machine using an arcade token from the nineties as a quarter, but when she talked about the way the world made women feel but she did it so badly it was like hearing the sound of a drill against your own teeth.

Annie had said, “It’s not like we don’t agree the world has problems, but Britta’s just _not_ the person to do deal with them,” because Britta never stopped in the middle, because she didn’t consider anyone else’s feelings, because she told Shirley that manicures were sexist when manicures made Shirley’s hands feel strong and pretty. And all that anger Britta had, so unfocused, so ready to hit anything that she thought she was afraid of becoming—

Shirley didn’t want to be Britta. God help her, she would never say it, it was so unkind, but it was true.

Britta turned out to be a good wedding planner: Shirley walked into a rehearsal that turned out to be a wedding that looked like a dream, gauzy and insubstantial and easy to clear out when it was over.

*

In accounting, Professor Whitman asked her why she was at Greendale, and when he pulled the truth out of her throat in some nasty-painfulness that was like pulling hair up from a clogged drain, it turned out that she was there because Andre had taken her life away and she wanted to take it back. That, and she told the whole class that he wasn’t much in bed.

She’d forgotten about that part (mostly) when they were getting back together again, and when she remembered it, she told herself that it didn’t matter. Marriage was about more than who she wanted to go to bed with. If she’d fallen asleep sometimes on her own with her hand between her legs and ideas of Sexy Dreadlocks, that was her own business, sure, but it was nothing worth overthrowing a marriage for. Some people just weren’t meant to have lives like that.

And she did have some good memories of Andre in bed. If they were memories of marriage instead of memories of sex, if they were memories of him thinking she was beautiful instead of him setting her skin on fire, well, the world wasn’t perfect.

Oh, but still, but still—they started off so well, she and Andre, in the study room, promising to stay partners with each other, to let her say that it was her turn and her time—so one night, in bed, Shirley said, “Baby, could you—like this—” and she took his hand in hers and tried to show him, but his fingers were stiff. He wouldn’t bend them for her.

There she went again, thinking that people could be better.

*

One hot Saturday, in those three gap weeks between the end of her summer semester and the beginning of the fall, Shirley couldn’t breathe in her own house. Andre had taken the boys to the park—she had heard something about a cookout there and a movie shown against the side of one of the buildings, but she hadn’t been listening as well as she should have been, the way the sweat was rolling down her—and so she was alone.

It was strange how the house had changed since Andre had moved back in. Shirley remembered a picture of the nativity she had kept on the wall, but Andre had thought it was tacky and cheap, so it had come down; the throw pillows she’d kept on the couch for her back had gone into the guest bedroom; she couldn’t find Britta’s green tea anywhere in her kitchen, even though chilled green tea sounded just like heaven to her right now. Instead, she called Troy, asked him if he’d mind coming over and tinkering with her air conditioner, since it seemed to be on the fritz.

Troy said sure, and he was right over with a toolbox that Shirley couldn’t stop looking at. It had stars painted on it in constellations. It had unicorns, phone booths, princesses, and one of those salt-shaker-looking robots from _Inspector Spacetime_ on it. Troy smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Abed and Annie made it for me. It’s the best air conditioning repair kit toolbox anyone’s ever had.”

As long as it had everything he needed to make her house cool again, Shirley wouldn’t say a word about it.

Troy took the front of her air conditioning unit and scrutinized it, tilting his head to the side like he was a puppy in a TV commercial. “Mm- _hmm_ ,” he said. He tapped something with his finger. “Mm. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with this.”

Shirley said, “But I can’t breathe.”

Troy stuck the front of the unit back on and said, “Then you need to go outside and eat popsicles,” and he found first a supermarket, then rocket pops, and then a lake for her, and they sat on a dock, ate their ice cream popsicles, and watched people cast lines for fish. All Shirley could think was that Andre would never have taken her here. She hadn’t had a rocket pop in years. She understood, all at once, that she loved her group more than she loved Andre, and that she would have to end things, because she couldn’t breathe in her own house anymore.

She took off her shoes and put her feet into the water.

“It may look like I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she said, “but I really do think I’m going to be fine.”

“I know,” Troy said. He took her hand. “Everybody knows that, Shirley.”

*

When Shirley left Andre, she left him the house. It wasn’t hers anymore, and she didn’t think she had the energy to reclaim it inch by inch again, the way she had done after he’d left. She took the boys and went to Britta’s, instead.

She made Britta promise she would throw out all of her marijuana and anything else she had, first, and lock up anything the boys shouldn’t put their tender young eyes on. Elijah kept saying that he wanted to go home. Jordan was better, or at least quieter, because he fell in love with Britta’s collection of incense sticks; Shirley let him play pick-up games with them that Elijah finally fell into, too, and when she put her boys to bed at night, their fingertips smelled like myrrh and what Britta said was sex on the beach.

Shirley was going to have sex on a beach one day. She was going to go swimming with dolphins. She was going to scream when she wanted to, shout and holler, and she was going to dance to Chuck Berry in her nightgown, her hands warm around Britta’s, and she was going to keep rocket pops in the freezer. She was going to put up as many pictures of the Lord as she wanted and she was going to hold her head up in church even though she’d left her husband. She was going to run her sandwich shop like it was an empire and she was going to get things _done_ , not as some damn compromise position but as just the way her world was going to work, from here on out.

Britta didn’t understand why she had left Andre, Britta had never seen that part of Shirley coming, so Britta touched her shoulder with delicate fingers and said, “Did he break your heart, Shirley?”

“No,” Shirley said. “He just didn’t know what to do with it. I do, though.”

She turned up the radio on “Johnny B. Goode” and took Britta’s hand. They both shouted the words more than they sung them, and they danced like they’d lost their minds. Right then and there, they were the only thing in the whole world that couldn’t have gotten even a little bit better. They were just so perfect she had to laugh.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] One Day She Will Swim with Dolphins](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3774817) by [aphrodite_mine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/pseuds/aphrodite_mine)




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